


You’re Making a Ruin of Me

by bluenebulae



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 4+1 Things, F/M, Minor Aang/Katara, Pining, Post-Canon, Zutara Week, Zutara Week 2020, day 5: hesitancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25619812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluenebulae/pseuds/bluenebulae
Summary: Four times Zuko nearly tells Katara he loves her, and the one time he does.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 455
Collections: Zutara Week 2020





	You’re Making a Ruin of Me

The first time Zuko nearly tells Katara that he loves her, the echo of lightning is still searing his chest.

He can’t see straight for long minutes, can’t see anything but her eyes, staring down at him with such intense desperation. The rest of the world is on fire, but those eyes – they’re a tether, his only relief in a world of agony. The only thing he can hold on to.

She’s muttering under her breath, and the words float down to him as if in a dream: “you don’t get to die on me, Zuko. You don’t. Not now.”

So he doesn’t.

She pulls him into her arms, and then to his feet, with such tenderness that it makes him ache. Nobody had ever held him like that before, and if he didn’t know he loves her already, he knows it now; it had spiked into his heart alongside the lightning, another scar, something he won’t ever be able to remove. The memory of the way he feels now, the first time his body has ever come alight like this, it’s a part of him now, etched into his chest.

When the healers come for him, he doesn’t want to let her go, not even for a moment, but Katara stays by his side as they shuffle him off to a wing of the palace he hasn’t seen for a very long time. He doesn’t miss the guards that station themselves outside the door, their spears pointed inwards instead of out; he also doesn’t miss the way Katara paces, one hand at her waterskin, glancing back at him anxiously every few moments as the palace healers apply poultice after useless poultice. Zuko wants to tell them to stop, that nothing will ever be able to rival what Katara has done for him already, but they only ignore his ineffectual protests until they’re satisfied.

They leave. The guards remain.

Katara throws them a dirty look before rushing to his bedside. “How do you feel?”

Zuko struggles to pull himself up on his elbows. His chest is a mass of bandages and pain; he can still feel the sting of electricity singing in his veins.

“Good,” he says. “I feel good.”

Katara furrows her brow and places a gentle palm on his chest. “Do you want me to try again?”

“You already saved me,” he says with a smile.

She laughs. “Only because you saved me first.”

They sit in silence, Katara’s gaze pointed somewhere out the window, her mind likely a thousand miles away from the Fire Nation, and Zuko watches her and feels his breath come shorter in his lungs.

“What will happen?” he asks.

“When they come back?”

 _If_ , he thinks. But all he does is nod his head.

Katara sighs. “Well, you’ll be in charge, I guess. So whatever you want to happen.” She cracks a wry smile. “How’s that sound, _Fire Lord_ Zuko?”

“Strange,” he says honestly. And then, “Will you help me, Katara?”

She looks back down at him then, and warmth rushes over Zuko like sunshine from behind a cloud, all molten in his veins. “Of course I will,” she says. “Whatever you need.”

 _I need you here_ , he nearly says. _I need you to be with me._

“Katara,” he starts, “I—”

“Wait,” she breathes, jerking her head back to the window so quickly that her hair fans across Zuko’s shoulders. “I see them.”

She’s up and running, and the words are caught on Zuko’s lips.

-

The second time, Zuko thinks the words may be his last.

Katara keeps her promise. She stays in the city as the world reforms around them, helping him to reshape it, and he revels in her patience and brilliance even as it stings him to see her laughing in the palace gardens with Aang, stealing a kiss on the balcony with Aang, always with Aang, two golden halves of a whole. Zuko could never hate Aang for it – the love he holds for the Avatar is too much, and he could never begrudge Aang his happiness, not after everything they’d gone through. He deserves this – _they_ deserve this.

It’s hard to watch, though, especially after Mai leaves. They’d given it their best shot, but they’re so different now, no longer the children that they were when they’d first thought they knew what love was. He doesn’t quite miss her – he misses the _idea_ of her, the hole she filled in his chest, the promise of comfort. She writes him letters sometimes from Omashu, where she’s helping to rebuild the city her family had nearly destroyed, but they’re short, blunt. Like her.

More and more, he finds himself turning to Katara for the things he is missing.

When Zuko needs her, she is there; she has always been there, not just for him, but for all of them, so much so that Zuko wonders how she can manage all of their friends’ various dramas and moral agonies without compromising herself. They are walking about the capital city one hot summer evening, nearly a year to the date after he took lightning for her, the sting in his chest when he stands this close to her still just as strong –

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?” she asks.

“Take care of all of us the way that you do. You’re always there when I don’t know what to think about a new policy proposal, or when Toph doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life next.” Zuko had overheard them talking, once, as he passed by Toph’s chambers in the palace; Toph had her back to him, but Katara had seen him and shot him a strained smile as she rubbed Toph’s shoulder. “It’s not as if you don’t have your own things to worry about, I’m sure.”

Katara shrugs. “You all need me. It’s what I do best.”

“It doesn’t get tiring?”

“It does, sometimes.” For a moment, she looks unsure, her gaze darting about the crowded streets. Then, abruptly: “I’m hungry. Do you want some Komodo chicken dumplings?”

He buys them for her, the least he can do as thanks for Katara traipsing around the city with him for hours and letting him forget about the mess of politics and guilt waiting for him at the palace for a little while. It’s dark by the time they begin their walk home, and so muggy that even Zuko’s light tunic is sticking to his body uncomfortably, the feeling only enhanced by how close Katara is to him as they walk home, the back of her hand brushing his every now and then and sending little sparks radiating up his arm.

“You know,” Katara says, “I think—”

There’s a noise behind them, so subtle that most people wouldn’t even notice, but their senses are both too heightened from months on the run to ignore it. They both whirl around, their backs pressed to each other, and Zuko remembers another moment much like this one, atop a barren cliff, Toph’s boulders flying at them and the silent reassurance of knowing Katara had his back.

“It was probably just a stray koalacat,” Zuko says, but Katara stays tensed, her water at her hands.

Then, so fast he can see nothing except a flash of silver in the dusk, Zuko’s right arm is plunged into agony. He cries out, lashing out fire with his other palm, and Katara is moving, her footsteps echoing through the alley. He hears splashes, a muffled groan, as he pulls himself to his feet.

She is locked in battle with two dark-clothed figures, their swords slashing out at her, far too close to her face for Zuko to stay still. He rushes at them, ignoring the pain that throbs stronger with each heartbeat in his arm, and catches one assassin’s feet out from under them with a tongue of fire.

Katara is too quick for any of them, though, and before Zuko can do much else she’s got them both caged in ice, anger radiating off her in waves.

“ _Who sent you_?” she roars. “ _Who do you serve_?”

“Katara,” says Zuko, fighting off a sudden wave of dizziness. “You don’t have to…”

When he opens his eyes again, he’s laid out on the cobblestones and Katara is looming over him, the situation achingly familiar. Zuko’s mouth is dry; the world around them has taken on a dreamlike tinge.

“Poison,” Katara says, her voice coming out distorted as if they are underwater. “They tried to poison you.”

The words are full of revulsion, with something else lurking underneath – something bitter and anxious. Something like fear.

“Katara,” Zuko says. His tongue moves oddly in his mouth. She’s shining, silhouetted by a halo of stars, too beautiful for this world, and the words are right there, they could slip out so easily. “I…”

He stops, thinks of Aang. Thinks of everything that could go wrong.

“We need to get you back to the palace,” Katara says, and loops her arms around Zuko’s waist.

He’s silent for the whole walk back, leaning into her warmth.

-

The third time, he holds Katara as she sobs, wishing he could show her how much she is loved in a way that doesn’t feel hollow in his mouth.

Zuko wasn’t expecting her to show up at the palace’s steps on the cool autumn day. It had been more than nine months since Aang and Katara had left for the Southern Air Temple, Aang determined to gather the remnants of his civilization from the world’s temples one by one, and though Katara had sent him letters every week, steady as a heartbeat, he hadn’t seen either of them in so long he’d nearly begun to forget what Katara’s face looked like.

( _As if you could ever forget_ , his mind whispers, and Zuko tries hard to quiet that voice, but lately, it’s been getting harder and harder.)

Now, though, it comes rushing back the moment he emerges from the palace doors, his meeting abandoned midway through at the word of a Water Tribe woman waiting for him in the courtyard. It couldn’t be anyone but Katara – Zuko knows this logically – but he still tries to prevent himself from getting his hopes up, just in case.

But it is her, her blue eyes shining with unshed tears that threaten to spill over the moment she sees Zuko. He catches her up in his arms, consumed with fear, as she murmurs “I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to go.”

“What happened?” Zuko asks. He presses his hand into the column of her spine, feels the way she shakes ever so slightly, and pulls her into him, taking her weight off her feet. Katara sags into his embrace gladly. Her head fits perfectly under his chin now. She’d grown taller, Zuko realizes.

“I broke up with Aang.”

“Oh.”

It’s so far from what he had expected that he is shocked into silence. He’d been preparing himself for injury, loss, a blow that would knock them both catatonic for weeks, but this –

He feels guilty.

Zuko feels guilty because his initial reaction is relief. The first thing he feels, before anything else, as Katara’s words course through him is relief that he doesn’t have to regret the way he loves holding her close, the familiar shape of her in his arms after so long without it. Relief that he won’t have to tamp down the hot, ugly jealousy that rears up when he needs it least at the sight of them together, or even of Aang’s name in Katara’s letters sometimes, when she speaks of them as a unit – _Aang and I, me and Aang,_ always the two of them together.

That’s when it truly hits him. Katara and Aang, separate entities now. Katara alone for the first time in years.

“I’m sorry, Katara,” he says, and he is honest. He holds her closer. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It was the right thing to do,” she says finally, later that night after they’ve eaten and her things have been moved from the air balloon crashed in the courtyard into her old rooms in the western wing ( _so I can watch the moon rise over the ocean every night_ , she’d said to him when they first took claim over the palace, and even though all the rooms were stuffy and disused Zuko could never say no to her, even then.)

Now, she is sitting in the courtyard with him, her bare feet dangling in the pond, ripples radiating from where her ankles meet the water. Zuko watches them, fascinated, as they set the turtleducks bobbing on the tiniest of currents.

“Why did you do it?” Zuko asks.

“I couldn’t go on any longer. It would have been cruel to Aang.”

“You didn’t think…”

Katara sighs. “We’re not the same people we were when this all started. Aang fell in love with me when I was still the girl from the Southern Water Tribe, the girl who barely knew how to control her element, much less be what the world needs of her. And I fell in love with him despite him being the Avatar, not because of it.”

“I understand,” Zuko says. “I had to do the same thing.”

“With Mai?”

He nods. “It was mutual.”

“This wasn’t. At all.”

Katara hesitates, glancing between the pond and the night sky and Zuko, before nestling her head into the crook of his neck, her cheek cool on his shoulder. “It was the right thing to do,” she says again, her voice small. “But I still worry. It’s selfish of me.”

“About what?”

She hiccups, the tiny motion reverberating through both their bodies, and it’s only then that Zuko realizes she is crying – nothing like her sobs from earlier, but gentle and anguished, and he wonders if she had to learn to cry like this so that nobody would feel responsible for taking care of her the way she always did for all of them. He wraps an arm around her, wishing he had the words to encourage it without patronizing her.

“He’s all I’ve ever known,” Katara says. “What if…what if that was it? If nobody’s going to love me like that ever again? He’s so _good_ , Zuko, and I just threw that away—”

“Oh, Katara.” He pulls her close against him because he can’t _not_ , and she curls up into him, turning her face into his shoulder. Zuko presses a kiss against the top of her head.

The words are there, right there at the tip of his tongue – _of course someone will, someone already does, how could anyone_ not, _Katara, how could anyone not love you like I do_ –

But he doesn’t.

He swallows hard, forcing them back down his throat, and they sit sour in his stomach as he says instead, “I felt that way about Mai, but I promise you’re wrong. We’re still young, Katara.”

“Yeah,” she sniffles. “You’re right.”

He holds her until the sun begins to peek over the horizon, the words still caught in his throat.

-

The fourth time Zuko nearly tells Katara that he loves her, he realizes that everybody else already knows.

As they get older, they see each other less and less; it’s not a conscious decision, and a piece of Zuko’s heart feels like it’s constantly missing with each day their motley little family spends spread across the world, but it makes the time they do spend together all the more special. Toph had arrived on Ember Island first, lazing about the courtyard in the sunshine while Zuko directed the housekeepers which bedrooms to ready and how to stock the kitchen with cuisine from all four nations. Suki and Sokka appeared a few days later, still bundled up against the Southern Water Tribe chill; then Aang, somehow taller than all of them now, serene in a way Zuko is still growing used to.

Katara arrives last. They meet her on the dock where she had once forgiven Zuko, appearing out of the sunset like a mirage, and for the first time in many months, Zuko feels whole. When he catches her up in his arms, it’s almost as if he’s sixteen once again and still thrumming with adrenaline from facing off with the old Southern Raider and awe from Katara’s power.

He notices the way she and Aang skirt around each other, less severe than it had been in the past; it had taken getting used to for all of them, but Katara had been right, Aang is older now and more mature, and when Zuko sees Katara pull Aang in for a brief embrace, he catches Sokka’s eye and grins.

It’s been a while since Zuko has felt his age; in the harried rush his life has become since assuming the Fire Nation throne, it’s easy to forget he’s still only twenty-one, not much older than a teenager still. With them, finally, he can remember. They find their way down to the beach after dinner, already tipsy off of plum wine and laughter, and when Zuko lights the bonfire in the middle of their circle and watches their faces light up, his heart swells along with the flame.

Sokka is the one who initiates the drinking game, of course. Zuko wonders if he should say something about how Aang and Toph are still seventeen, _technically_ still too young to be drinking in the Fire Nation, but Toph beats him to the punch, rolling her eyes as she cackles “as long as Fire Lord Frowny won’t arrest us for it!”

Zuko turns red, but Katara shushes Toph. “I _will_ turn you in to the Fire Sages.”

“Sounds like you need another drink, Sugar Queen.”

By the time the conversation turns to truth or dare, Zuko is quite a bit drunker than he’s been in recent history, the firelight wavering before him and turning his friends into ghostly shapes. Sokka is slumped against Suki, his head in her lap; Toph and Aang are huddled on the sand in front of the fire, cackling to each other. He catches Katara’s eye across the fire. She’s watching Aang, looking wistful, until she looks up at him.

Zuko offers her a smile. She returns it, her face softening, and even though he knows he’s too drunk to be making good decisions right now, Zuko makes to stand anyway, suddenly filled with the desire to feel her at his side.

“Who wants to play truth or dare?” Sokka howls.

Zuko sits back down, his heartbeat still racing.

The dares are all silly at first, the questions even worse. Aang goes plunging into the freezing ocean; Sokka does an impression of Jeong Jeong that’s so horrible, even Zuko is reduced to sobs of laughter. Toph makes a shockingly good rendering of Momo out of sand with a few stamps of her feet. Then she turns to Zuko, her pale gaze eerie in the darkness.

“So, Sparky. Truth or dare?”

“Mmmm…” Zuko tips his head back, staring up at the stars and gulping down cool night air in an effort to get his head to stop spinning. “Truth.”

“What had your heart beating so fast earlier?”

His head whips back down. Toph is smirking slightly. She _knows,_ Zuko realizes. The little devil.

“I—”

He could say it. He nearly did, earlier, when he had gotten up; had he sat down next to Katara like he’d intended, Zuko can see the whole night snowballing away from him, the alternate path in which he’d let it out in a drunken haze. Or the night he’d spent by the pond with Katara, stroking her hair, or the time she’d saved him from the assassins, glittering in the moonlight, or the time before it all, when the world still hung in the balance –

They’re all staring at him. Everyone but Katara. They’re all staring at him, and then he sees Suki’s eyes flash to Katara for the briefest of seconds, the down-turned corners of Aang’s mouth, and Zuko realizes – they _know_. All of them know. Even _Sokka_ knows, Zuko guesses, based on the way his eyes have gone sharp, the warning Zuko sees therein.

Katara isn’t looking at him, though. She’s staring out at the ocean, a faint blush splashed across her cheeks, or maybe it’s just a trick of the firelight.

“No idea,” Zuko says. “Must be the plum wine.”

Toph gives him a _look_ , and he knows exactly what it means: _I’m not buying your bullshit._ But she lets him turn to Suki and ask her “truth or dare?” in a voice that sounds even less confident than he feels.

He must not be as good a liar as he thinks.

-

Then comes the day when they first break ground for Republic City.

They’re all gathered on the shores of the Earth Kingdom island, and there isn’t much there yet besides piles of rock and a few small factory buildings, but Zuko can practically see it rising before him: the glittering towers, the narrow streets, the colors mixing together into one incandescent rainbow of nations, the first place where they can truly have no divisions. 

They link arms before the crowd, all four nations, benders and non-benders alike, and with Aang on one side of him and Katara on the other, Zuko feels a little bit invincible.

By the time that night falls, though, his high has worn off. Zuko knows there are people in his own country that oppose the idea – oppose _him_ , too, and believe that he’s diluting the great nation with alliances, that he is _too_ close to the Avatar and the waterbender that had defeated their one-time princess. He has wondered, so many times, how to get them to see the world the way he does, the way he knows it could be.

It’s not often that the thought keeps him up at night, but tonight is one of those nights. Zuko spends long hours tossing about on the itchy sheets of the Earth Kingdom guest house before rising. The moon’s glow outside his window is an invitation.

When he takes his first breath of cool sea air on his room’s balcony, it’s a heady relief. Zuko’s eyes fall to the island across the bay from them. Even now, in the dead of night, a few spots are lit up with searchlights; Sokka and Toph had only finalized the plans for the city grid weeks ago, and yet already, he can see construction rising off of the ground. _The most modern city in the world,_ Sokka had said proudly, and Zuko couldn’t help but believe him. One day, they would all end up back here, once their duties to the world were fulfilled and the damage his family had done was set straight. One day.

“Zuko?”

He turns, wondering if he’d imagined the voice.

But no, Katara is standing in the doorway, bathed in moonlight. Her hair is pulled hastily away from her face, her feet bare, and she is smiling gently.

“You couldn’t sleep either?”

She nods. “Too much on my mind. Is it okay if I join you?”

“Of course.”

All these years later, and she still fits so snugly into his side. There’s poetry in that, Zuko thinks.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

Katara looks down at the waves lapping at the rocky coast below them. “Do you think we’ll get to see it?”

“See what?”

“The city. Do you think we’ll live long enough to see all the nations finally come together?”

“I don’t know,” Zuko says honestly.

“I want to,” Katara replies. “So badly. But I also think that’s part of the beauty of it. Maybe we won’t live to see it, but it’s like we’re living on inside it.”

Zuko smiles. “You think they’ll remember us?”

Katara rolls her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know, Zuko. I’m not sure if they’ll bother keeping track of the boy who lived inside an iceberg for a hundred years, or the girl who invented metalbending, or the man who finally brought peace to the Fire Nation.”

“Or the woman who became the finest waterbending master the world had seen in centuries.”

“Okay, now you’re stretching it.”

“Believe me, I’m not.”

She laughs, the sound windchimes on the night breeze. “What else do you want to be remembered for?”

Zuko takes a moment to ponder the question. There are so many things he would have said at different times in his life – to be honorable, dutiful, a loyal servant to the Fire Nation; to be a great leader, fair and compassionate; to be accepted, to belong. All of it is still true. But there’s more now, too.

“To be a good man,” he says. “To be someone who can lead by example. And…to be someone who loves deeply, too.”

It’s the piece that has been missing, the splinter in his heart whenever he sees Suki and Sokka huddled close, or receive a letter signed jointly by Mai and Ty Lee – a concept he’s still getting used to. For so long, he’d thought he had no room in his life for it, too busy putting the world first.

But for the first time, he can imagine saying the words without feeling them stick in his throat.

Katara is watching him now, her lips slightly parted. “I think that you’re all of those things already.”

“To _love_ , Katara.”

She swallows, but doesn’t look away.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” she says. “I’m sure there’s no shortage of suitors for the hand of the Fire Lord.”

“I don’t want any of them.”

Now, Zuko thinks she finally understands. She startles slightly, something sparking in her ocean eyes. And yet all she does is move infinitesimally closer, warm against his side.

“What do you want?” she whispers.

When Zuko finally says the words, they’re caught against Katara’s lips, a secret held between them, fragile and beautiful. When Katara says them back, they float through the night air, coiling their way down his throat and settling in his heart, filling it up so big he thinks it might burst.

They watch the dawn rise over the bay and face the new world together.

**Author's Note:**

> i've been writing fanfiction for nearly a decade and have never written one of these 4+1 fics before!! WILD. so that was my attempt :')


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